Phil Houtz

Many of the buildings have colorful pasts. The YWAM annex where we hold our meetings was once a gay porn club. The YWAM staff are extremely compassionate about the people who live in the city. Later in the evening we went out to explore the city. My group ran into a couple of the roughest,…

Ping pong at YWAM Originally uploaded by phoutz

Arrival and chilling at YWAM Originally uploaded by phoutz

Story Time, Santa Cruz Originally uploaded by phoutz

Worship Time in Santa Cruz Originally uploaded by phoutz

First Night: Vintage Faith Well, we’re on the road again with the high school group. Tonight we stopped at First Presbyterian Church (aka Vintage Faith) for pizza dinner and time to bone up on our personal stories. The old Fellowship Hall has been converted into a coffeehouse. A group called Jesse’s Pride played jazzy testimony-rock…

The other day I set out with a noble goal–to find and map a better local hike than Ventura’s two trees. Midway in my exploration rats! My low battery alarm went off. Today’s hard-knock lesson is this: always bring fresh batteries on a hike. Doesn’t matter that you’ve got a GPS unit with the highest…

To the person who wanted to know if dogs were allowed on the Grotto Trail: the trail is posted no dogs, no mountain bikes. Truth is that you really wouldn’t want to take a dog down there anyhow, unless you’ve got a champion boulder-hopper. Once you reach the grotto the trail gets sketchy. Not to…

I know one little doggy who will be having an Easter hangover–the cocker spaniel just wolfed down four cranberry-orange scones while the “Easter Bunny” was hiding eggs down in coyote-ville and marking coordinates on his handheld GPS. The things we do for love. (Mind you, this is to delight the married daughter. The little princess…

Without doubt the best GPS unit is the one that you don’t have. My Garmin eTrex Vista HCx was barely out of the box before I started wondering if maybe I should have taken a closer look at the Magellan Triton 500. You see, the Magellan will download maps from the National Geographic Topo! Backroads…

The folks at Jeep Forums have a new gig, kinda like MySpace for the Jeeper crowd. Their promo emails bill it as: JeepSpace.com – Online social network for Jeepers to meet and interact. Blogs, videos, groups, forum and more! I poked in and found it a little cumbersome to navigate. I have some of the…

Yesterday the cocker spaniel (somehow) got two loaves of Irish Soda Bread off the counter and consumed both. The results were not good. The soda seems to have reacted badly with her delicate digestive system. The dog’s sides filled out to the point where she was nearly spherical. Normally athletic, the dog could barely pull…

Saturday is the worst day to go to Vertical Heaven, the local climbing gym. Saturday is Birthday Party Day, and the gym is likely to be filled with grade school grommets, running, jumping off stuff, throwing chalk bags at each other. The kids aren’t the problem. They zip about like supercharged neutrinos, never colliding with…

People who know the outdoors will say that you’re better off with a good liquid-filled compass, a map, and a little know-how than with any whiz-bang GPS unit. After a year or so of scrambling around in the sticks I’m here to say that they are right. If your goal is to orient your self…